The Ultimate Tape Archive V4.5
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Release date: 24th of December, 2023

Welcome to the most complete Commodore 64 cassette archive that exists. By complete, we do not mean it contains all the titles ever made, but all included titles are complete with coverscans and manuals all in one place for you to enjoy.

If you had no idea on how to spend your Christmas this year, let us give you a helping hand! We kept our promise and returned with another update before a full year has passed. This time we bring you 250 new additions giving a total of 2250. This is The Ultimate Tape Archive V4.5!

We've gained another member this year, and almost all the new additions come from this person and they have even more additions lined up for future releases. We really appreciate this new blood, and it's making the future of the archive look brighter than ever. Also, a big thank you to the person who keeps lending us tapes to preserve, as that has certainly played a big part in this update. We wouldn't be ready for a Christmas release without, so you kinda saved the Christmas for us all. Thank you! :)

So a few new details and a repeat of some old ones... This version features a few fixes. First, we managed to upload a .tap of Sprite Man that had somehow been corrupted during our cleaning process. This was brought to our attention by one of our users. This feedback is highly appreciated, and we encourage you to follow this person's example by reporting any mistakes or problems back to us.

Another strange case that had us puzzled, were reports of a game that would crash during gameplay, yet there were no errors in the data and nothing apparently different from the original... except the trailing pause at the end of the tape! This peculiar issue found its way to Bacchus / Fairlight who picked it apart in order to figure out exactly what was going on, and he even made a video of it in the process. The game in question is Star Paws from Software Projects. For those who didn't watch the video, after the game loaded there's a counter still running while the tape continues to play. This counter stops when the cassette player is stopped and it will have to stop between two specific values. If it fails to do that, the game will corrupt intentionally. Our initial .tap had a pause that would not leave the emulated tape running for long enough, so the game would eventually crash.

In light of this, we also updated the 4 Most Cute compilation from Alternative Software for the same reason. But for this one, we'd also like to point out that the original tape was equally screwed. If you actually have the original and just leave the tape running until it stops, this counter value would be too high and you'd get the same corruption. There is no mention of this anywhere in the instructions either so this probably ruined the experience for some legit owners. If you for some reason randomly got the idea that after 10-20 seconds you'd just stop the tape, you'd also be lucky enough to enjoy a fault free game!

As we've mentioned in every release, we strive for 100% complete releases, but have decided to still include a few releases that we currently miss posters or audio tapes for, since it does not directly affect the playability of the games.

For the tapes that can benefit from index files (.idx, supported by DC2N, NOVA64 and the Ultimate products), we've still done our best to create them, particularly for multi-game compilations and multi-load games. A few of these multi-load games are so poorly programmed, that they do not stop the tape when a title screen or level is loaded. There is no workaround that we can apply for these, so if you find a game not loading properly, be sure to check if this is the cause. There is also one version of the Burner fast loading system we are aware of that will not work on all C64s. This is because the loader is written using unofficial machine code instructions, some of which are unstable and create different results on different C64s.

We have as usual used Tape Manager V1.3 (https://csdb.dk/release/?id=172213) to organize the content, and again exported an sqlite-file for the NOVA64 front end (or other applications that may have implemented it). The latest version of the NOVA64 front end can be downloaded from CSDB (https://csdb.dk/release/?id=237664). The front-end will enable you to run the images on both emulators and on real C64s (with additional hardware). The latest version will also make it possible to start VICE (later versions) using the offsets in the index files, making game compilations more useful in VICE if you choose to launch your games from within the front end.

And also as before...

You are free to distribute this archive to your friends, but it should always remain 100% free and kept away from any solutions that require any kind of registration or payment. Apart from that, we do not care much about what happens, as we consider this a piece of history, OUR history.



If you for that or any other reason want to get in touch with us, we can now be reached at ultimatetapearchive@proton.me

Until next time, we still hope you will have fun and find lots of great (and maybe some not so great) memories!


Signed,
The Ultimate Tape Archive Team

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